Photographs by Elliott Verdier
In March 2009, after a long night on duty at the hospital, Emmeline Lagrange took a deep breath and prepared to place a devastating phone call. Lagrange, a neurologist, had diagnosed a 42-year-old woman with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. The woman lived in a small village in the French Alps, an hour and a half drive away from Lagrange’s office in Grenoble Alpes University Hospital.

On September 20, 1938, a man who had witnessed the rise of fascism packed his suitcases and fled his home in Berlin. He arranged to have smuggled separately a manuscript that he had drafted in secret over the previous two years. This book was a remarkable one. It clarified what was unfolding in Berlin at the time, the catalyst for its author’s flight.
The man fleeing that day was a Jewish labor lawyer named Ernst Fraenkel.

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A century ago, in 1925, the Ku Klux Klan came to Washington, D.C. The Klansmen had arrived in early August: the Kleagles and Dragons and Exalted Cyclopes, regalia folded and packed, families in tow. Loyal men came from the South, as expected, but that was not where the group’s true strength lay.

Ever since he bought Twitter in 2022, Elon Musk has been titillating his fans with wild conspiracy theories from supposedly secret files. Now that Donald Trump is back in office—and has granted the world’s wealthiest private citizen free rein to dismantle federal agencies—Musk’s conspiratorial musings are no longer just entertainment for the extremely online. Internet fantasies have become a sufficient pretext for crippling the government.